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Comment by jgautsch | Hacker News Reader

I had a sales meeting with a large IT company a week ago and they said that if we licensed them our product, they would want to do a re-write in Java if the product (currently Rails based) proved to be effective. My app is for physician use, so there could only theoretically be _at most_ less than 1000000 users, so "at scale" wouldn't be so huge, relatively. Any ideas as to why this company was thinking this way?

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Simple. Maybe they were a JAVA-shop?

Yep. Java=serious enterprise software, and they've got all their IT organization built on IBM servers running J2EE Enterprise Java Bean containers and they actually understand it, or at least think they do. Rails=toy hacker stuff, and scary because they don't know what it is.

Considering the type of information that would be stored in an application for use by physicians, they might be considering Java due to the number of security issues found in Rails as compared to the number of security issues found in something like Spring over the past several years.

Possible interfacing with ancient legacy datasources? Only one I could think of. Well that and the head honchos hadn't followed tech since the digital storage mediums for medical data was Access and Excel, and Java was considered "new".

Instead of full rewrite, migrate to JRuby. From sysadmin standpoint, an rails app running on JRuby is java. so you can submit .WAR file to them & they can deploy it like a normal java app running on the JVM.

we are considering groovy and grails for this sort of reason. I work with lots of enterprise clients who won't consider anything on premises thats not .net or java.

They won't run Linux-based software but they'll buy into a programming language called "Groovy"! ... LOL ...

why not jruby and rails? rails has a lot more of a community, and you'd still get to run it on java.

I use groovy and grails at work and the only similarity of grails and rails is name.

Grails is a Jvm clone of Rails, and Groovy of Ruby.

I was under the impression that grails is a clone of rails (I think it was actually called rails at one point and they were asked to rename it), but not that groovy is a clone of ruby - I think they have drawn a lot of inspiration from ruby and python, but not that it is a jvm version of ruby - but someone please correct me if im wrong. It seems like it is more about being a scripting version of java itself.

Groovy starte d off that way under James Strachan, but when Graeme Rocher took Groovy over for Grails, he added a MOP just like Ruby's.

Actually, JRuby is a JVM clone of Ruby. And Ruby on Rails on JRuby is a JVM clone of Rails.

I don't know where to start with the differences but Grails is nothing like Rails. The ORM, the naming conventions, configuration, GSPs vs ERB, the way routing works, and pretty much everything else is different. They both use MVC and Grails draws inspiration Rails but is it in no way a clone.

Grails was originally called Groovy on Rails.

Why don't they consider something like JRuby? It's proven, and allows Ruby to run in the JVM, given Java 7's improved support for dynamic runtime.

Misunderstanding about the performance bottle necks of RoR and desire to prematurely optimize.

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